Linux Alternate Boot Configuration

[Alzhy]

Our UNIX Environments employ dual Boot Environments for:

Easy Roll-ackability in case of patch mishaps
Fall Back for Admin mistakes rendering the OS active

We employ many means of copying an active OS environment to a fully bootable alternate OS disk.

What are you doing on the Linux OE. I know there are many 3rd party commercial and open source solutions out there -- but what do you use?

Would periodic dd's or even clone of the back end SAN boot LUN suffice? Anybody doing it?

TIA.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

dd will work. I worked in a shop that did that with HP-UX and Linux.

many servers have hardware raid. You can prior to a major update simply pull the second drive in the hot swap mirror set.

I recommend doing this on the SAN. Adding the element of needing the fiber connection to work to the mix risks leaving the systems administrator blind with no diagnostic tools in the even of a hba or SAN issue.

SEP

[Ivan Ferreira]

Probably in your case will be a good option to have boot from SAN from a storage capable of doing snapshots of the data.

In that case, you can just snapshot your OS every time you need or even implement DR solutions using replication.

Also, server virtualization is a very common practice that provides also easy rollback in case of a failure.

[dirk dierickx]

when your boot disk is mirrored, you already have a copy at hand. just break of the mirror before you start whatever dangerous thing you want to do, when finished run some tests and if you're satisfied you can establish the mirror again.

in fact you can have as many mirrors as you like, if you have 3 disks in your server you could have 3 mirrors. 2 used for your default protection as normal and one mirror you sync and break of again each week or whatever period you like.

[merciless]

www.mbeadm.com


multiple booting envs adm

[Alzhy]

This is AWESOME!

You may want to add to your website:

HP-UX: DRD (Dynamic Root Disk)

I've been actually able to write a SCRIPT to automate cloning Primary to Secondary/Alt-Boot environment. So we're all set.

But I will support this tool if you guys (or gals?) plan to GPL your scheme and contribute it to the various distributions.

CongratZ !